Picking your keywords is vital in an effective search engine positioning strategy. After all, being able to anticipate which keywords your customers will be using to find you gives you the foundation on your positioning strategy. It's important to always approach this from the point of view of potential customers and try to anticipate which keywords in which combinations they'll be using to find your site.

Be More Specific..Pick Power Phrases

Many website owners, when giving us their keywords to optimize for, pick words that are far too broad to allow any reasonable hope of positioning effectively. For example, here are the keywords a discount airline wanted to use for their positioning:

airline, cheap, airfares, discount

Now, the chances of anyone doing a search for discount airfares on Google or AltaVista with the single word "cheap" are extremely low. They would become very frustrated with the results and would quickly narrow their search by using a phrase such as "discount airfares". This allows the website owner to be more specific in their positioning efforts, and therefore, more successful.

The More Specific, The Better the Traffic

The temptation is there to go after the very popular keywords in your category. For instance, if you're a sporting goods store, to go after "golf" rather than "golf clubs" or even "wilson golf clubs". While it's true that golf gets a lot more requests, try doing a search for golf on any of the major search engines and see what your results will be like. Are there many places to buy or find out more about golf clubs online? No. Put yourself in the place of your potential customer. Will you sift through these millions of returns? No. You'll try another search with more specific keywords. Remember, many of the searches that register for a generic keyword like "golf" are these first shot searches that then are quickly narrowed down. Always (ALWAYS!) start with more specific keywords and once you achieve good rankings for these, you can afford to broaden your keywords a little. But we can assure you that the most qualified traffic will always come from the more specific keywords.

Regionalize Your Keywords

When picking your keywords, don't forget to add regional identifiers. For example, a realtor in Portland, Oregon would stand a lot better chance of achieving effective search engine rankings if they optimized for ''Portland real estate" rather than just "real estate".

Don't Forget Common Misspellings

Many words are commonly misspelled during searches on the engines. If your keywords include one that is commonly misspelled, than using this misspelling as one of the keywords you optimize for could bring unexpected traffic to your site. For instance, one of the most popular search terms is the word "genealogy", but did you know that the misspelling "geneology" receives almost as many searches?  Because many other website owners don't know or pay attention to this strategy, you'll find it quite easy to achieve top rankings for these keywords.

Further Resources - Other Articles

The Ultimate Guide to Keyword Optimization
Sellitontheweb.com - May 99
We do this for our Keyword analysis, but it's a good guide to picking keywords.